Creativity, with care.
MeitY's amendments to the IT Rules have been in force since 20 February 2026. They apply to synthetically generated information published in India — not only to deepfakes, not only to political content, and not only during an election. A Deepavali film, a product still, a founder's voiceover: generated, published here, in scope. Two obligations run at once. The asset has to carry a label a person can see, and the file has to carry provenance a machine can read.
Written for the person who has to sign off on it.
Nine duties, and what happens to each one inside the product.
The middle column names which regulator is asking, because the two do not ask for the same thing — that is the section after this one. The right column is the answer per medium, and where the answer is nothing it says nothing rather than something adjacent.
| Obligation | Source | What PikSel does |
|---|---|---|
| A visible label on a still, covering at least 10% of the display area | ECI advisory, Oct 2025 | The band is composited into the pixels before the file is written, and the area it covers is measured on the finished render rather than assumed from the layout. A poster template that composes its own band is measured after layout and refused if it comes in under the floor. Fifty-eight generated backgrounds in the political catalogue go out this way, every one of them labelled. |
| A visible label on video | ECI advisory, Oct 2025 | Nothing. There is no burned-in band on a PikSel video. The publish path copies the streams unchanged and stamps metadata; the coverage figure it returns for a clip is empty, because none was drawn. A frame-band burn-in exists in the codebase and has no caller on any path a file can reach. If your asset is election content that needs a visible on-frame notice, this is the row to bring to the meeting. |
| A spoken disclosure inside the first 10% of an audio asset's duration | ECI advisory, Oct 2025 | The recorded notice is prepended to the speech, and the combination is refused if the notice would run past the ten-percent mark. Because the window is a fraction, the notice sets a floor on length: an asset has to be at least ten times its own notice, and that floor is computed per client from the duration of the file they recorded — a notice in another language is another floor, and nobody is quoted a Hindi campaign's answer. |
| A spoken disclosure inside the first 10% of a video's duration | ECI advisory, Oct 2025 | The notice opens the narration, so it is inside the audio the published cut carries. The finished length is measured off the takes that were actually spliced and checked against the notice before the bed is mixed or a frame is drawn — a reel too short to hold its own disclosure is refused while it is still cheap to refuse. |
| The generating entity named in the file's own metadata | IT Amendment Rules 2026, r.3(3) | Written per format, not per hope: PNG text chunks on a PNG, Exif on any other still image, and container metadata on an MP4. A synthesised voice line is the exception — there is no tag written into the audio file, only the spoken disclosure and the register row (see Limits, below). The product reads its own provenance back off an image file, because writing it is only half a claim and a silently dropped tag is the failure the format-switch exists to prevent; there is no equivalent read-back for a published video. |
| Records of all AI material, with creator and timestamp, available for verification | ECI advisory, Oct 2025 | One row per asset, written at the moment of generation: asset id, path, model, the prompt, the operator who ran it, and a UTC timestamp. The register is append-only — in the deployed database, the application holds no permission to delete from it. A report for one subject is one call. |
| Takedown complete within three hours of notice | ECI advisory, Oct 2025 | A takedown writes its own row carrying the reason and the moment it was recorded. It does not edit the row it withdraws, so the gap between the two timestamps is what evidences the deadline was met. Removing the file from the platforms it was posted to is still the distribution layer's job, and still yours. |
| A label may not be removed or suppressed downstream | IT Amendment Rules 2026, r.3(3) | On a still the label is in the pixels, so removing it means editing the image rather than deleting an overlay or a caption track that a re-upload would have stripped for free. On video there is no band to remove and none to suppress; what a re-encode would have to strip is the metadata and the spoken notice. |
| No misrepresenting a person's voice or likeness without their consent | ECI advisory, Oct 2025 | Consent is checked before any work begins, not after the file exists — generating from a withdrawn grant and deleting the output afterwards has already done the thing the grant was meant to prevent. A record with no recorded statement behind it is rejected at the point it is stored, and a withdrawal sets a date on the record instead of deleting it, because a withdrawn grant is evidence that a grant once existed. |
Every cell in the right-hand column is a description of code that runs on the publish path, not of a roadmap. Where the honest answer was nothing, the row says nothing.
One asset, and two people entitled to an opinion about it.
The IT Amendment Rules and the Election Commission's October 2025 advisory both govern labelling, and they do not specify the same label. MeitY dropped the fixed fraction: the standard in the Rules is qualitative — the label has to be prominent and easily noticeable to the person looking at the asset. The Election Commission kept the arithmetic one, and for election content the notice has to cover at least 10% of the display area, with a spoken disclosure inside the first 10% of a duration.
So a brand's Deepavali campaign and a constituency's reel are not the same compliance problem, and a product that answers only one of them has answered the easier one. Which regime you are under is not a setting; it is a fact about your content.
| If the asset is | The standard is | Which means |
|---|---|---|
| Brand or commercial creative, no election content | IT Amendment Rules 2026, r.3(3) | Qualitative. Prominent and easily noticeable, with no stated fraction — which is a lower floor than 10% and a harder one to argue about, because it is judged rather than measured. |
| Election or political content | Both, concurrently | The IT Rules still apply, and the Election Commission's figure applies on top of them. At least 10% of the display area, and the disclosure inside the first tenth of a duration. |
PikSel implements the stricter ECI figure where the ECI's regime applies, and measures coverage on the render in both cases — so an election still satisfies the arithmetic standard and a brand still satisfies the qualitative one, from the same code path, with the number recorded either way. A brand asset can then carry a band that belongs to the design rather than one stamped on top of it, which matters more than it sounds: a notice that reads as a defect is a notice somebody will ask to have removed.
Knowing which of the two you are answering to is most of the work.
What PikSel does not do.
A compliance page that lists only strengths is a marketing page. These are the gaps as they stand today, written here so a reader finds them before a regulator does.
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It does not file anything on your behalf
There is no submission, no registration and no notification that PikSel sends to any authority for you. It produces the artefacts and the record. Producing them is not the same as discharging the duty, and the duty stays with the publisher — which is you.
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It does not certify you compliant
Nothing PikSel emits is a determination that your asset satisfies the law, and no output of ours should be shown to anyone as though it were. What you get is a labelled file, provenance in that file, and a register row with a timestamp on it. Whether that is enough for your asset, in your regime, is a judgement your counsel makes, and PikSel is built to make that judgement cheap rather than to make it for you.
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What it embeds is not a C2PA manifest
PikSel burns a label into a still's pixels and writes the generating entity into the file's own metadata. That is not a C2PA manifest, it is not cryptographically signed, and it is not verifiable by a C2PA validator. We will not call it one. C2PA is a separate, voluntary scheme; we make no claim of conformance with it, and the Indian rules as they stand do not ask for it.
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Video carries no visible on-frame label
Stated twice on this page on purpose, because it is the assumption a reader arrives with. A published clip carries the generating entity in its metadata and the spoken disclosure inside the opening tenth of its duration. It does not carry a band across the frame. If your asset needs one, PikSel does not currently produce it, and this row is the reason to say so before the contract rather than after the notice.
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Audio carries no embedded metadata
A published voice line carries the spoken disclosure, prepended inside the first 10% of its duration, and a row in the register. It does not carry a generator tag in the file itself — there is no metadata-writing step in the audio path, unlike the still and video paths. If a downstream system checks a file's tags rather than listening to it or querying the register, an audio asset will read as carrying nothing, because nothing is written there.
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Metadata does not survive every platform
Provenance is written into the file, and several distribution surfaces re-encode or strip metadata on upload for reasons of their own. That is why a still's label is in the pixels and not only in the tags — but on a medium where the notice is metadata plus audio, a platform that strips one of the two has taken something we cannot put back from here.
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No third-party security or compliance attestation is held
PikSel holds no audited security report and no international information-security standard. If your procurement checklist has a line for either, we do not have it, and we would rather you learned that on this page than in week three of a review.
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The three-hour clock is a path, not a promise about platforms
A takedown writes its row and the record shows when the notice arrived and when the asset came down. Actually pulling the file from every surface it was posted to is the distribution layer's work, and on most of those surfaces the account is yours, not ours.
Bring a brief and an asset you have already published.
We will generate against the brief and show you the three things that come out with the file — the label composited into the still, the provenance in the metadata, and the register row — and we will tell you which of the two regimes your campaign sits under before you ask.
Questions a lawyer would ask are the ones this demo is for.